Women at Work, Men at Home: The Increasingly Common Arrangement Raising Eyebrows
By Terry Selucky
“What does your husband do?”
This question may conjure the image of a group of lunching ladies, dressed in pastels, and discussing the office work of their breadwinning husbands. The assumption that the husband is the breadwinner is a common one, and it is steeped in deeply gendered stereotypes about men and women. Despite recent findings reporting that the number of male “house spouses” has doubled in the last 40-years, the stereotype persists.
Trish Walker, Senior Managing Director at Accenture, says she has fun answering the question “What does your husband do?”, which she says often comes up at cocktail parties.
Walker’s partner is a stay-at-home dad – and he is not and should not be – defined by his employment, the company he works for, or the salary he brings home.
“Our journey of having my husband stay at home while I worked has been fun, challenging, rewarding, and for the most part a great decision for our family,” Walker said. “The key is constant communication about what’s working, what’s not, how the kids are doing, and what we can adjust.”
According to the report Stay-at-Home Fathers: Definition and Characteristics Based on 34 Years of CPS Data, more men than ever before—about 550,000 in the past 10 years—are fulltime stay-at-home dads. The Pew Research Center reports that “compared with stay-at-home moms, these full-time fathers are older, less educated than their spouses, and their households have significantly lower incomes.”
The 550,000 stay-at-home dads comprise about 3.5 percent of all married couples with children where at least one spouse had a paid full-time job, which is nearly double the number in the 1970s when roughly 280,000 men—about 2 percent of the total—stayed home with the kids.
The Pew Research Center reports that compared with stay-at-home moms, homemaker dads are older (on average, 41 years old vs. 37). Stay-at-home-dad families also earned about $11,000 less in the past decade than families where the mother did not work outside the home. About 36 percent of stay-at-home dads have less education than their wives. In contrast, only 27 percent of stay-at-home moms had less education than their husbands.
Silence & Stigma
According to Stay-at-Home Fathers, which was written by a research team headed by University of Illinois sociologist Karen Z. Kramer using government data, the number of full-time caregiving dads is only expected to increase in the coming years. So why the silence around the topic? It seems some people find it too subversive and maybe too threatening to talk about. Anything that disrupts tradition is met with resistance, after all. In an article written for Time’s Ideas blog, writer Vivia Chen delved into the subject, writing:
“Indeed, you can go to any number of big firms in New York City where there’s a modicum of female partners … and the buzz among the associates is that those women are either unattached or married to men who stay at home. ‘They seem to belong to some sort of househusband club,’ said one associate about the female partners with kids at Davis Polk & Wardwell. They just didn’t like to talk about it.”
In fact, Chen’s experience writing her article was that, in most partnerships where women were the main earners, they did not want to talk about the bending of roles. One woman told Chen, “My husband and I have talked about it, and we don’t want the scrutiny.”
For generations, women stayed at home while their husbands worked and this is still a fairly common practice, one that can be found at every socioeconomic level – and it’s never considered shameful. Why are stay-at-home husbands being stigmatized? Perhaps because so much hesitancy surrounds discussions around these arrangements.
Old Habits Die Hard
It’s true that old habits die hard. Successful women are thriving, but in many cases, they must spend more hours at the office than men. Interestingly, according to the Pew study mentioned above, when women stay at home, they also spend more time on housework and the children: 26 hours with housework and 20 with child care, compared to men’s reported 18 hours doing housework and 11 hours taking care of the kids. Yet at the workplace, women’s time is arguably more consequential: more hours equals less earning power. Once again, we meet systemic barriers to high-powered women.
It’s easy to discuss how traditional gender roles and perceptions of women have unfairly placed hurdles in the way of professional women seeking career advancement. It’s easy to talk about work-life balance and how women are still too often saddled with domestic responsibilities despite being earners themselves. These are topics we’ve been discussing for years, but re-shifting the conversation about how gender roles also adversely affect men is somehow controversial. We’re able to recognize the value of the work that women do in the home – and how yes, it does constitute work – but when men do it, it’s somehow shameful?
Dynamics are changing and the bottom line is that roles should be dictated by an individual’s passion and ability, not some outdated idea of how things “should” be.
I believe that the core to this discussion is a mind shift about who should stay at home. This is not a feminist discussion also – ideally, both spouses should support each other in their career endeavors wholeheartedly without having to feel sacrifice for family responsibilities. At the end of the day, if the most important two pillars of the family (the husband and the wife) are not happy about not being able to achieve their full potential, the children and other members of the extended family might be negatively impacted indirectly. It is subtle but the stay-at-home option should not be a sanctuary to either the husband or the wife as a “retreat” from the daily grinding of a work life. There are many women and men who are very happy with the role of staying at home and they see their value that way. They should be respected for the contribution to their families. Conversely, there are others, such as myself, who see that they can handle both, which usually translates into a few very tough years juggling advancing at work place and raising a family at the same time. Domestic responsibilities should be openly discussed among family members and possibly with the help from trusted nannies and cleaning services companies.
To address the view of women having to spend more time in the office to achieve their career successes, I believe open communication with colleagues and continue raising the issue to senior management can lead to positive discussions. There have been progresses in the integration of work/life priorities. This doesn’t only involve women─I am sure there are dads who want to be home and spend some quality time with their children as well, which comes back to the topic of building a trusted team. Another solution could be openly discuss whether some sort of “part-time” arrangements make sense, i.e. if some choose to slow down due to family reasons such in the case of needing more time for very young children, they would agree on some form of reduction of time in the office with the ensuing reduction of total compensation; whereas in other cases some others choose to stay the course full-speed because they are able to get reliable care or have grown children. There is nothing shameful to have open discussions about personal items with a professional manner. We need to rally more support by male counterparts in the same businesses.
Another important aspect to this discussion is that when some (men and women) choose to stay at home for a variety of reasons, including taking a fresh look of their career options, they should not be penalized in terms of rank and pay when they transition back to work. Obviously, the actual position will be predicated upon their “current” (the time transitioning back) proven skills that they can bring in to the firm.